Windows 8 for $50 made it an easy call to keep my existing hardware. A LEAP sensor will help with the touchscreen issue. Other than that, my three year old PC beats most COTS PCs benchmarks below $2k... and I'm not going to spend that kind of money to maybe get a slightly better frame rate on my favorite game

I agree with the idea of the law. At that age, it's appropriate for educators to have that kind of information in order to get feedback and drive the education process. I would not say the same for marketers, who would also love to help drive the education process in more profitable ways.

The last time we had people getting into programming because of the glamor was the dot-com boom, which lead to the dot-com bust, which lead to thousands of good programmers getting tossed out with the millions of bad. I want to work in an office that looks like one of those Stepford models, but some consulting gigs I get, I'm lucky to get a whole cube to myself. I have much better equipment, accommodations, and connectivity at home. All I think this video does is poorly try to raise the barrier to entry on small shops getting talented developers.

More like a recruiting video to try to hire every last programmer who hasn't gotten drained by addiction to a video game.

Frankly, I've never seen an office as Stepford as the ones in that video.

I don't know any kid who would look at any office I've worked at in the past 20 years & get that excited about it.

So programmers who can get into a country club like that are gonna go there, and the rest of the world is gonna have to pay those four or five companies for our services. :)

Congrats... Slashdot has Slashdotted itself...

The battle will really be over the non-smartphone users.

Android has an Achilles heal. It's old, immature and hard to update. It reminds me of Windows XP in terms of user experience and platform vulnerability. It's dug into the market well, but it's only mature enough for "smartphone" users who readily work around quirks and ill behaviors... not enough to grab the non-smartphone user.

This is why iOS will hold on to it's lead while it can maintain the premium smartphone image befitting of its contemporary Mac OS X. That said, "premium smartphone" is the iOS Achilles heal. A cheap, hobbled iPhone won't grab the non-smartphone user either.

BB already lost it's page to Microsoft in the Enterprise market.

More importantly, while MS isn't that popular in the US, it's got a jump on the non-smartphone users overseas... which I bet will only spread. It's got the base OS maturity (security) of Windows 7, the UI consistency of it's contemporary Windows 8 desktop, and the price range to make them accessible.

My wife traded her clunky droid for a WP8, and both our moms (our kids' grandmothers) love their Windows Phones ... this strikes me as good indicator that Windows Phone could bring the non-smartphone market into the smartphone era, eating up that market as it goes, if given the chance.

Windows 8 isn't bad... it's new. Just like Windows 95 was... and we all know how Windows 95 through windows 7 failed so miserably. (Can anyone remember the term "Ludite"?)

Another good reason PRO is likely to fail... I've said it before & I'll say it again. Surface is a cloud car.

If I need Intel horsepower on a tablet, I'll remote desktop into a real computer (or cloud-hosted VM). Why pay for Intel in a tablet when the RT version will provide excellent mobile functionality at significantly lower costs (in terms of both price AND power) with the ability to hook up to heavy iron to do the heavy lifting?

The more comments you have in code, the higher risk you have of time sucks and bugs (past, present, and future). Instead, use naming and syntax to make your code as human readable and comprehensible as possible. Bytes are cheap, there's rarely need for clever abbreviations; instead of getting clever with them, get clever with expressing your code closer to plain language. Think about the names of your nouns and verbs (and even adjectives and adverbs), and make sure they make sense to anyone who understands your problem domain.

In my humble opinion, broken code comments are almost as dangerous as broken logic, and should be treated as a bug if it's wrong. It's wrong if it's inappropriate, outdated, misleading, takes more than a line or so, or superficially obvious. If it needs more than a line or so, it should be documented, and the line in your code should brefly identify the problem and documentation location. I'd recommend that it refer to sections within a technical design document.

In NH, we had a recent bit of a scandal on the fact that no ID is required at all. A voter can claim to be anyone, and be handed a ballot... and the checklists are full of good spoofing candidates, like recently deceased... In light of issues like that, I think anything that addresses anonymity & accountability better than what we have is way better.

I vaguely recall writing reports about other subjects in grade school, but I remember very well researching the history of computers and turning an assignment for a two page report into many pages on the subject. That was the first time I remember bending school to my own interest. I remember realizing that schools were not prepared for me. I knew I had to find ways to turn every subject into something to do with computers, programming, & technology... not long after that history report, I got my hands on a cheap computer. I wrote programs not just for entertainment, but to drill myself on less interesting school subjects. I wrote programs to illustrate lessons. I even dabbled with my own word processor so I could write for English class. A few people understood my interest & found material for me, which I learned in addition, and I taught myself things like CPU design, binary logic & arithmetic. I made it interesting for myself. Today, I can easily say that I twisted my own education into something way better than my educators probably realized.

Just because we haven't explained or observed it doesn't mean it can't be.

Do you believe in a Higgs boson? If so, congratulations... you're a believer. You believe in something that people have spent billions trying to prove the existence of (and still haven't, just yet). If you're not a believer, what is it that you think your mass comes from? Or do you not believe you have mass? Now, if the Higgs is found... that's cool... but what does it get it's properties from? How do you know any of this exists... did you design the LHC and fire it up and make the observations yourself, or did you have faith in someone else's word?

The Bible is full of stories that couldn't be well articulated in the realm of understanding of the audience that originally received it. We had to grow up a bit and start digging into science to discover the deeper meanings of the metaphors.

If government officials have authority to recover stolen goods (cars, property, etc) then they need to start taking care of this sort of thing, too. Why create a "new" organization for it... governments can agree to work together enough to form Interpol, simply extend Interpol to cover cyber crime. It seems like an obvious extension to me. As mentioned previously, the damage was done when the "vehicle" was "stolen"... if the "car" "crashes" in the authority's pursuit to limit its contribution to the victimization of more innocents, that's the fault of the perpetrator(s), not the authorities.

At least someone put some real effort into trying to make a keyboard layout designed from the start to be easy to type fast.

I don't care who "ran the study" making QWERTY hard to type fast... I'm satisfied that its design goal was met. QWERTY was designed to try to minimize mechanical type-writer hammer entanglement (jams) caused by typing too fast. Anyone who ever used an old mechanical hammer style typewriter has seen how much those jams sucked. As carefully designed as they were to avoid it, get going too fast, and you might even bend a hammer arm trying to un-tangle the mess... then you were out time and money while the rig's being fixed at the shop.

On the other hand, I appreciate that Dvorak's goal was to design something that was easy to type fast with, which is what I need in my line of work. And I appreciate that he did run studies to try to test and/or validate his thoughtful, if not scientific design. It sounds almost like scientific method.

I wouldn't say I put more effort into learning the Dvorak layout, though. I took a class to learn touch typing with QWERTY, and used it heavily & constantly for over ten years, with plenty of "repetitive stress injury" along the way.

I considered learning Dvorak's layout an investigative experiment until I realized that in three or four months' time, my proficiency with Dvorak's layout had at least met my former proficency with the QWERTY layout, if not already exceeded it... no classes necessary. RSI's still happen, but I can push out quite a bit more before I have to take a break.

If you're worried about your typewriter jamming, go ahead... QWERTY might save you some money. But what is it with people who use (and even defend) standards against reason simply beacause they are "popular"?